Can Google Read JavaScript? Yes! According To Google’s Blog

This topic has been debated and studied by many SEO professionals.

Considering more and more (in fact almost all modern sites) sites are using JavScript, Google can no longer ignore them.

According to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, Google now officially announced that they have been making improve to be bale to see and index sites with JavaScript.

Few important points they pointed our are

• If resources like JavaScript or CSS in separate files are blocked (say, with robots.txt) so that Googlebot can’t retrieve them, our indexing systems won’t be able to see your site like an average user. We recommend allowing Googlebot to retrieve JavaScript and CSS so that  your content can be indexed better. This is especially important for mobile websites, where external resources like CSS and JavaScript help our algorithms understand that the pages are optimized for mobile.
• If your web server is unable to handle the volume of crawl requests for resources, it may have a negative impact on our capability to render your pages. If you’d like to ensure that your pages can be rendered by Google, make sure your servers are able to handle crawl requests for resources.
• It’s always a good idea to have your site degrade gracefully. This will help users enjoy your content even if their browser doesn’t have compatible JavaScript implementations. It will also help visitors with JavaScript disabled or off, as well as search engines that can’t execute JavaScript yet.
• Sometimes the JavaScript may be too complex or arcane for us to execute, in which case we can’t render the page fully and accurately.
• Some JavaScript removes content from the page rather than adding, which prevents us from indexing the content.

References

http://moz.com/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really

http://moz.com/community/q/does-google-read-javascript 

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html

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Tony

I am an SEO consultant who happens to be interested in affiliate marketing.
I build websites and use them for testing various SEO strategies and tactics.

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